


Desert Rose

by liluye (mouselini)



Category: Dragon Age II
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Established Relationship, Fun and Fluff, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-12
Updated: 2017-07-17
Packaged: 2018-07-14 13:33:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7173884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouselini/pseuds/liluye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gang goes to Morocco and everybody likes it but Varric.</p><p>Don't take the title seriously, it's a Sting song.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Hawke, mostly

**Author's Note:**

> I've written like, 65% of the next In Your Room chapter and I'm currently bulk-editing the fuck out of I Bet You Wished. This is a very stupid story.

It all started when Merrill decided to fall in love with a Saharan extortionist on the internet.

Being of direct Saharan extortionist descent, Isabela had managed to sniff, call, and stop the bullshit by way of network-provided parental controls and discount boxes of Kids' Kleenex with Aloe. Unfortunately, like the Credit Card Incident that still rears its elephant head through the windows of Varric's now-foreclosed bungalow on 5th, her interference came two minutes too late:

While Merrill had ultimately failed to reach the neighborhood Western Union where she could've wired the shit peanuts of her savings account to “pay off Zevran's three surgeries and also a goat”, she'd already accepted a marriage proposal, booked a one-way ticket to Morocco and ordered four niqabs off Amazon in case her dress wasn't culturally suitable for the wedding.

 _The wedding that would've actually happened_ , Hawke muses, reclining far enough to jab someone's gut with the tray behind his seat. _If it wasn't for y--_

They're on an international flight to Germany because they love Merrill and care about her feelings and her ticket to Marrakesh was neither refundable nor transferable. Nobody knows why she booked from Frankfurt, but Varric's been vocally harboring suspicion that she'd typed “Frank” into the departure slot on Priceline, “Frank” like _Franklin, Tennessee_ , a well-to-do town of rolling greens and conveyor belt sushi that they've never lived anywhere near.

“Does Franklin even have an airport?” Hawke asks, hoisting the blanket off his lap to show an attendant that his belt's been on for twenty minutes, at least.

Next to him, Anders snorts his weight in Afrin and chews Sudafed tablets by the handful. “Iuno,” he sniffs. “Where's that again?”

“Tennessee.”

“Have we been to Tennessee?”

“ _We_ have,” sings Varric from across the aisle, poking his head around the passengers still fussing with their carry-ons. He's seated one row ahead to the left, sandwiched neatly between Fenris and Aveline, both of whom are staring at their laps with the gaiety of Catholic nuns. “Hawke drove us through Nashville once, on the way to Florida. Got decent chicken.”

Anders, who hates flying due to some repressed childhood trauma that his therapist's been trying to get out of him for years, asks a lot of questions when he's nervous. “What were you doing in Florida?”

“Benzos,” Hawke replies, absent. He taps the screen on his facing headrest and frowns when its text appears in Korean. “Can I change this?”

“No.”

“Oh.” A pause. “Can you?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

–

Isabela knows a guy who knows a guy who owns a network of riads by the souks, and though Merrill isn't getting married anymore, it had only taken four favors and a pint of pure Kentucky moonshine, inconspicuously tucked into Varric's bag of underwear, to secure hospitable accommodations for the whole family.

Of course, she'd spent the better part of a week trying to convince everyone that going would be “great”:

“It'll be fun,” she'd said, over breakfasts, at the bar, to Aveline's secretary during a meeting that had sent her into her sixth consecutive week of overtime, to Fenris's voicemail, to Varric's wife, to the cop that pulled her over for going 60 in a school zone on her way home from FedEx yesterday. Just “it'll be fun,” and “no, trust me. It'll be _great_.”

The itinerary, posed over a night of poker in which attendance was mandatory, is as follows:  
Stage one – Connecticut to New York City by Megabus. (Check.)  
Stage two – New York City to Frankfurt, Germany by luxury big-budget airbus. (Also check).  
Stage three – Frankfurt, Germany to Milan, Italy by standard economy flight. (Arbitrary and entirely Merrill's fault; to be checked in nine hours, give or take.)  
Stage four – Milan, Italy to Marrakesh, Morocco, after a night's layover at a completely different airport, by mysterious third-party transportation service that charges roughly 15 USD per seat. (They'll be happy if they land.)

Their return flight is direct, at least.

“ _Great!_ ”

–

“No, but it's in _Korean_ ,” Hawke explains, hand waving emphatically at his entertainment screen. The flight attendant nods and tells him, in German, probably, to straighten his seat for take off.

Thirty-four minutes of upright sitting pass before the plane starts its taxi toward the runway, and another twenty pass before the pilot introduces himself as Alistair over the intercom and apologizes for everything on God's green Earth.

“Sorry, I don't like this delay,” Alistair says, and Hawke's immediate reaction is to jerk off the air and point it at Varric, “there's a line on the strip. Sorry. I don't like this delay at all. I'm so sorry.”

The intercom clicks off just as Anders whimpers, “we're putting our lives in his hands?” and the plane inexplicably reverses before he can find the stack of lunch bags he'd shoved into his backpack on his way out the door, so he rocks himself slowly and begins to hyperventilate into the general atmosphere of the luxurious, big-budget lower class cabin.

“We're not even airborne yet,” Hawke tells him, grimacing down at Anders' fingernails as they threaten to bend from the force with which they grip his armrest.

Isabela lays her head on Anders' other shoulder to say, “I didn't know planes can go backwards” and when Anders responds with, “I didn't either,” it sounds like old, hot air getting forced from the mouth of a deflating balloon.

“It won't be awful, probably,” Merrill hums, after a minute. She's wearing her wedding dress and Hawke's not sure if her feet even touch the floor. “Last time I read about Lufthansa, though, the whole entire plane w—”

“ _Don't_ ,” tries Hawke, because he'd read the ticker three years ago and decided that was the last time he'd ever watch the news again, but she continues, oblivious, “because then the co-pilot went really—”

“Yeah, please, Merrill, we really don't need this.”

“...and then the only thing the people on the ground heard were terrible screams—”

She flushes as everyone in earshot shouts “MERRILL” and doesn't speak again for a very long time.

 

Two additional apologies and an amplified sentiment of _thank Christ_ later, Alistair finally gets them up in the air. Beverage carts march down the aisle and block Anders' multiple attempts to die in the bathroom, and clearly Hawke's missed a memo about liquor being free on international flights because he's just ordered a “still water, s'il vous plait” and is blandly watching Isabela extend her rum in salute to a sexy rando in a nearby seat.

 _Well, shit_ , Hawke thinks, as Fenris—also of Saharan descent, though heavily diluted with the Barcelona trophy blood of his estranged mother—holds out his plastic cup for round three before the plane even has a chance to stabilize its cabin pressure. He makes a low gurgling sound when the attendant asks him to wait.

They're served a choice between chicken and pasta, so Hawke goes for chicken, naturally, and notes the peripheral motion of Fenris ordering the same. He's not surprised when Varric ends up cleaning his tray, though, because Fenris is shit about eating as it is and airline meals barely meet the FDA criteria for Purina puppy chow, but ten years of babysitting picky brats have blessed Hawke with the keen clairvoyance of a soccer mom—he spares a sour moment to think, _oh, thank God_ —which means that his backpack's a permanent dispensary of sandwich crackers and individual packages of strawberry Pop-Tarts, with and without frosting.

Somewhere over the American side of the Atlantic, Varric and Isabela play musical chairs and the flight attendant returns to tell them, in English, to stop, and tell Hawke, in German, that they're in the process of resetting his entertainment console so he can enjoy the remainder of his flight understanding all the movie summaries he keeps trying to read. They pull through, and it's not long before Hawke's balls-deep in reruns of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Cultural decency has never topped Hawke's priority list but he's always been careful about toeing the line between fun and blatant disrespect, so when the fourth episode ends and he casually glances up to see Anders watching Aladdin, he instantly feels compelled to leave the plane.

“Seriously?” he asks, incredulous. Anders, who looks a lot less like Samara from The Ring than he has all flight, doesn't hear him.

One double-take shows him that Isabela and Merrill are watching Aladdin, too.

“Are you guys kidding?”

“Um,” Isabela pauses on Abu and rips off her complimentary headset; beside her, Merrill giggles like a baby and claps her hands. “What?”

“You're watching Aladdin on the way to Morocco?”

“No, I'm watching Aladdin on the way to Germany.”

Whatever Hawke wants to say cuts off when, in the corner of his eye, he notices Varric chewing holes into the rim of his plastic cup, eyes fixed attentively to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.

Planes don't have clocks in them, which is so fucking weird, and it takes Hawke _forever_ to find out how long they've been flying because he once had a nightmare in which he blew up an airport with an incoming text from Isabela, so he keeps his phone in three separate pieces between two separate bags every single time he boards anything, including cruises. They're barely a third of the way through their flight when Fenris tiredly stumbles across the aisle and demands,

“Switch,” and Anders is so elevation-sick that he doesn't even give a fuck who takes his seat because as far as he's concerned, he's spending the rest of his life in a luxurious, big-budget Lufthansa airbus toilet, which is where he's going if there aren't any beverage carts in the way.

Hawke sighs a hoarse, “ _there's my boy_ ,” as he lifts their joint armrest, kissing the sleepy weight of Fenris's head when it drops against his chest. “Took ya long enough.”

“You could have moved.”

“I could'a.” Flicking a Pop-Tart onto Fenris's lap, Hawke pulls his blanket over the both of them and slides himself as low as he can without hitting his knees on the seat. He grins like an asshole when Fenris places a grateful peck on his cheek and grins again, wider, when Fenris lets him kiss him for real, brief but deep enough to make him wish that they were at his place and in his bed and fucking like they were this morning.

Fenris throws a cautious glance around the dark cabin before he situates himself against Hawke's side, Pop-Tart wrapper crinkling slightly in his hands as he breaks it open. It's gone before Hawke even sees him eat it, so he disturbs everyone by rummaging around for another that Fenris hungrily snatches from his fist.

Hawke yawns. “Wanna watch Aladdin with me?”

“No.”

“Wanna—”

“ _No_.”

Smiling, Hawke drags his hand through Fenris's hair, which smells like his own shampoo, and doesn't complain when Fenris stuffs earbuds in and ignores him for the rest of the flight.


	2. Mostly Varric, but also everyone else

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still not in Morocco, but I'm having a lot of fun writing this.

They get to Frankfurt with a group-collected eight hours of sleep, of which Aveline contributes five and annoys the shit out of everyone by being more awake than ever before.

“Those were some incredible seats,” she muses—again—as the seven of them trudge across the jetbridge. Behind her Anders swallows vomit, and Hawke, Varric, and Fenris silently groan up at the ceiling. “We should write them a review, don't you think? I've never been so comfortable on a plane.”

Fenris loses himsef to a smoking room the moment they enter the terminal, and Varric follows Hawke to the nearest bathroom where he says, “watch my bag” and leaves his suitcase by the stall Hawke falls asleep against.

Of course, the unattended suitcase gets confiscated by concerned authorities halfway through the layover, but Varric doesn't realize it until he finds Anders eating salad by their next departure gate.

“Where's Hawke?”

Varric frowns. “I was gonna ask you that,” he says. “Where's my luggage?”

Shrugging, Anders makes a jab at his cherry tomato. It flies off his plate and rolls toward a giant potted plant, where Merrill poses for a selfie with a group of German university students who call her _Murl_.

“...You had luggage?”

–

The flight to Milan is smaller, foodless, and crowded. Varric snorts as Isabela makes a nest out of the seat beside him, and as his head hits the covered window, he vaguely hears the airport intercom announce its plea for suspicious packages.

“Wait, hold on,” Fenris suddenly announces. He leaps into the aisle and tears his headphones from his ears. “Where is Garrett—?”

Five pairs of eyes widen at each other from three points of the plane as it starts its taxi toward the airstrip.

–

_“Achtung Herr Garr-hut Hoke: ihr Flugzeug verlässt.”_

...The flight to Milan is smaller, foodless, and delayed indefinitely.

_Attention to passenger, Mr. Garrett Hawke: we urgently invite you to board your plane.”_

\--

Italy's pretty much the same, except this time Varric keeps his carry-on close and binded with an industrial-duty garbage bag.

Fenris can't find a smoking room so he elbows his way through Customs with his emergency EU dual-citizenship card pointing out like a pair of brass knuckles, and with Isabela latched to the handle of his backpack, Hawke once again disappears.

For hours.

And hours.

They don't find him again until they take a trolley to the heart of downtown Milan, where Merrill relieves her silhouette into the dust of a restaurant window and breathes, “ _Hawke's in here._ ”

But everyone's already noticed, as it always is with Merrill's observations, and Anders asks “wait, why are you whispering?” as he follows the cloud of Fenris' cigarette smoke through the restaurant's jingling door.

They're greeted by a dramatic wave and the grin Hawke likes to give his mother when she visits for the holidays. “Ciao, you guys!” he laughs, the word _ciao_ repeating, manic, under his breath. “Where's Isabela?”

Varric frowns. “I was gonna ask you that,” he says. “What the fuck're you doing here?”

“Um, eating gelato.” Hawke waves his cone in emphasis; it's purple and trailing steam. “What the fuck're you doing here?”

Seating themselves at a table outside, Fenris and Aveline order Irish coffees and refuse to talk to each other until they resume their journey to the other airport.

Three wrong trains and a Hawaiian pizza (with salami?) later, they arrive at the other airport two hours after Isabela, who'd set out to find the Duomo di Milano, failed, “started an international incident, probably,” and went into cardaic arrest upon learning that Varric had stubbed his toe against it on his way to the closest metro station.

“You can't exactly miss the Duomo,” he explains, straightening his back against Hawke's because every seat in the arrivals lounge has someone sleeping in it, like Aveline, and Isabela couldn't have been fucked to save him one, too.

“You did,” Fenris reminds him. He's got _three_ chairs. “What time does our plane leave?”

Hawke responds with “eight, babe,” and Varric's suddenly overcome with the first two stages of grief, so he and his luggage lead Fenris out the nearest sliding glass door.

“Ten hours? Fuck this shit,” Varric says, exhausted.

Nodding, Fenris smacks his cigarette pack agains his palm before he offers Varric a yellow crack lighter that they're later forced to surrender to Milpensa security.

\--

“This has no frosting.”

“What?”

_Click. Click. Click. Click._

“This has no fucking frosting. Wake him up.”

“What's up?”

“Shut up, Anders.”

_Click._ “Isabela's Pop-Tart doesn't have frosting on it.” _Click. Click._

“Seriously? Why do they even make those?”

“Shut _up_ , Anders, you're out of your element.”

_Click._

“Do you have to take pictures right now?”

“If anything, they should make ones with _more_ frosting.”

“Yeah, fuck the one guy in the world who likes these.”

_Click. Click._

“Shh. I think Hawke's that guy.”

“I'm not that guy.”

“Fuck you, go back to sleep.”

“ _What kind of monster would buy the ones with no frosting?_ ”

“Hawke, I think.” _Click. Click. Click._

“Merrill, one more time and the camera's mine.”

“Actually, they came home with Fenris—”

“Do not speak my name.”

“Can you guys shut up? Please?”

“Alas, she lives.”

“Good morning, Aveline!” _Click._

“Oh my God, give me the fucking—”

“No! I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to, please don't--”

“Too bad. You can have it back when we board.”

“Oh, god _damn_ it, does anyone have a power converter?”

“Is your phone dead?”

“No. Shut up, dude.”

“Cinnamon, brown sugar and _camel dick_ , more like...”

“We do need a power converter. Generally speaking.”

“...I mean, just give me a block of frosting, I don't even need the rest.”


	3. Merrill and Varric

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Though thoroughly exaggerated, a lot of this story is based on real-life events from my actual real life. Any offense is 100% directed to white tourists, and I sincerely intend no disrespect to any culture apart from my own.
> 
> Still stupid. Still fun. I just realized that this story isn't angsty and I'm having an identity crisis over it.

Nobody knows what time it is when they get to Marrakesh, but the sun's out so they shuffle into “bus number six” because it “goes to the Square”, or at least that's what the man at Currency Exchange said when he'd personally escorted Anders out by the arm.

Merrill insists on taking selfies the whole bus ride despite—or maybe because of—the mascara melting down her face. She grins and skips through a handful of Instagram filters until she finds one that makes her eyes look “red and spooky, like a dracula,” and Varric, whose ears are still clogged from the extreme pressure of their most recent flight, is forced to acknowledge the double-chin he'd acquired through the new household obsession with shrimp po'boys by being in the background of every goddamn picture she takes.

“It's fine, you're yawning,” Isabela assures him, thumb sweeping across the screen of Merrill's iPhone. She zooms in on Merrill's nose before finding Varric in the corner of the frame. “Everyone has a double-chin when they yawn.”

“I'm not yawning in this one.”

“Huh, you're not, are you...”

Grumbling, Varric drops his head against the window and counts the palm trees as they pass, dust-coated and slightly red like the sepia filter on Merrill's most recent Snap of her wedding dress. Shoeless kids chase the bus on rusting bicycles; Varric shoots them an emotionless snort when they wave, face subconsciously tilted to give his reflection, ergo the world, the illusion of a chiseled jaw.

“Quittez le bus maintenant. Sortez.”

They know they've reached their destination when Fenris shoves himself through a ream of Italian tourists to get to the front of the bus. Glancing over his shoulder, Varric asks Hawke, “has Broody been here before?” and grimaces at how muffled his own voice sounds.

“ _SORTEZ!_ ”

“Nah, but he understands Arabic, I think,” Hawke says, nudging Aveline awake.

“That was French.”

“Oh. Wait, really?” Hawke swings his backpack over his shoulder and, dislodging Merrill's suitcase from its space between two seats, wistfully adds, “yeah, I mean, he speaks French for sure.”

Fenris is already barefoot and three-quarters through his cigarette by the time Varric climbs off the bus, followed closely by Merrill, who pauses to take pictures of the driver and sets the Marrakesh public transportation schedule back by a solid three minutes.

“Puppet, put your shoes back on,” Isabela warns Fenris through a click of her tongue, motioning to the dark, sandy walkway ahead. “The first half-kilometer's all horse shit.”

Merrill interrupts, “what's a kilometer?” and Varric only hears the word “shit”, and Fenris obviously doesn't hear anything at all because he marches onward with fingers hooked through the joined laces of his Keds.

“Hey, babe?” Hawke calls after him, “babe, watch out, think that's piss—” But Fenris leaps over the puddle like a bored gazelle and doesn't bother looking back when Hawke commends, “ _nice_!”

Exhausted and increasingly annoyed with his most-likely permanent, asymmetrical hearing, Varric forces a yawn and attempts to empty his eustachian tubes with a finger. It’s fucking hot out, and he’s staring straight into the desert sun when he suddenly collides into brick-shithouse Hawke, who has inexplicably decided to stop walking in the middle of the goddamn pathway.

“What the--”

“ _Anders, move, what the fuck?_ ”

On his hands and knees, all the shit in the world couldn't prevent Anders from experiencing a Turin Horse moment. Even Fenris, fifty feet ahead of everyone else, pauses to see what the fuss is about, and when Anders buries his contorted face into the leg of a whipped mare, Varric immediately reaches for the emergency cigarettes and, frowning, offers them to whoever's willing to sit there and watch.

Isabela accepts the pack. “Let's just leave him,” she says, and they do.

\--

The market—“Jemaa el-Fnaa,” Isabela loudly corrects for the fortieth time, echoed by Fenris, who knows his history and doesn't hesitate to detail the century-old executions that occurred on the very grounds upon which they walk—is fucking gigantic. Tan and hazy and framed by white plastic tents, the strange aroma of smoked meats and candied dough materializes in thick, dark streaks through the bazaar. Littered with vacationing Europeans speaking their melodic and sometimes startling native tongues, it's a loud place, loud and open-spaced and crawling with merchants: street merchants, shop merchants, wandering merchants, child-merchants and tourist-trap merchants and also a classy cafe.

Varric can’t hear like, 80% of it.

“The bazaar isn't open-spaced, doll,” Isabela laughs, narrowly avoiding death by motorbike with a thoughtless step to her left. She pauses at a fruit stand to squeeze a particularly wrinkled prune. “Don't you fucking Google things before you do them? Ew, no, I don't want this.”

Hawke swings an arm around her neck as he declares, “ _I_ Googled it,” grinning like he's expecting a gold star and a hat, but Isabela's too busy arguing with the fruit guy to hear him and soon enough Varric's nursing a bag of universally unwanted apricots as he falls into step with poor Merrill, who's just dropped her iPhone onto a blue Berber carpet because she can't drag her suitcase and take pictures of herself at the same time.

The phone sits between an adolescent boy and his impressive display of clay ashtrays, braided leather bracelets, and hand-painted paddle drums priced at 15 Dirham a piece. Visibly panicked, Merrill pulls out a Rick Steve's pocket guide in hopes of translating her “I'm sorry”s and “May I please take this, it is my only camera”s into French like the kid isn't as phenomenally trilingual as he is, and bows when he hands it back to her without a word.

“Don't _bow_ , Merrill,” Varric groans, wheeling his own suitcase close.

“Oh, I thought you're supposed to bow,” she says, innocent. She takes an inconspicuous picture of the merchant before cramming her iPhone into the front-pocket of her luggage, then she clears her throat, straightens the tulle of her browning wedding dress and asks, “where to, my sir?”

Varric leans closer to her. “What?”

“Sorry, I forgot you’re deaf today,” she giggles back.

“What?”

“I said, SORRY, I FORGOT YOU'RE DEAF TODAY AND WHERE TO, MY SIR?”

 _That's a damn good question_ , thinks Varric, because he's just realized that Hawke and All Them have already vanished into the thick Medina crowd. With a sharp tug to his carry-on, he cautiously leads Merrill into the main square, where they're immediately approached by four petite old women in dark niqabs, palms quivering as they ask for change in Arabic, then French, and finally broken English.

“No speaky,” Varric mumbles, batting their hands away. “No speak English, we.”

To his dismay, Merrill informs him (screaming) “ _oh, we speak English, Varric!_ ” and fishes out a coin purse from her luggage. It's a kind gesture, very kind, to offer a few Dirhams to old veiled ladies and a few more to the young boys who gather as a result, and another twenty to the waiter who just jogged over from a nearby restaurant, but when a line of upturned palms forms around them Varric has no choice but to herd Merrill away from the crowd before she loses every mortal remnant of her dignity.

Merrill blows them all kisses before she stops dead in her tracks, hand still clasped to her mouth. “Hey,” she gasps. She snaps her head around in sudden panic. “Where is everyone?”

“What?”

“WHERE IS EVERYONE?”

Varric frowns. “I was gonna ask you that,” he says. “C'mon, Daise. Let's get Anders, at least.”

–

Anders isn't where they left him and neither is the horse.

“Well, shit.”

“Oh boy,” Merrill sighs as she takes a picture of the track marks Anders had made with his knees. “He can't have gone very far. He can't have gone far, right?”

Squinting across the market square, Varric subconsciously twists his jaw, which somehow clogs his ear more. “I don't know,” he says. He straightens his back and looks over his shoulder, where a group of young, tall boys scrutinize them from a horse-drawn carriage. Soon they point, and Varric hurriedly drags Merrill back to the middle of the market.

“Maybe we should just—” Panic creeps up his chest. Varric stops himself as Merrill's body language threatens to wander away. “Hey! Hey, don't go anywhere alone.”

“I'm hungry, Varric,” she tells him, stomping toward a doorway. She stops to rub the sweaty lace sticking to her stomach, then flails her limbs in childlike delirium, raising her voice even higher: “I'm hungry and I'm _hot_ and I want to eat _food_.”

“Well, you're not gonna fix that at a shoe store.”

“Oh.”

After ten minutes of dragging their suitcases across broken cobblestones in search of their riad, Varric and Merrill accidentally find the real souks, masked by great, beige walls and tucked in the far corners of the square. Easy to mistake for residential alley ways, two hole-like entrances pump European tourists out like blood to a heart, and even as he tries to wrench Merrill back to him, Varric is too overcome by the sheer enormity of these hidden vessels to put meaning into his grip.

Instantly enshrouded in layers of brilliant fabrics and brass lanterns that shine golden against the stones, Merrill wisps away like a moth to a flame, leaving Varric slack-jawed but still subconsciously trying to pop his ear. It takes a minute to re-center himself and come to terms with his sudden solitude, then he straightens his back, bows his head, and marches forward into the crux of the cavernous pathways that reinforce Isabela's previous statement of “the bazaar isn't open-spaced, doll”.

“Well,” he mumbles to himself, looking at the sun peaking through the wooden panels overhead. His periphery is crowded by metallic spectrums, blurring rich colors that reflect off intricate, nearly magical patterns of iron and stained glass.

 _God_ , thinks Varric, slowly reaching out to touch a kaleidoscopic clay plate. _I bet Hawke’s gonna wish we had acid_.

He quickly finds Merrill in a nearby booth, smeared fly-like into a wall stacked high with gem-toned pillows. By the time he reaches her, she has two shopping bags, a “genie lamp”, and a large ceramic spoon imprinted with the Moroccan flag.

She bursts into tears when she sees him. 

“Isabela is going to kill me,” Merrill wails, ducking beneath a low-hanging, spherical chandelier as she follows Varric out of the booth. She stands up too fast and knocks her head into it anyway. “I promised her I wouldn't be stupid with my money. I said, it's okay, Isabela, I won't be _stupid_ but then I bought this spoon.”

“The _spoon_ was only 10 Dirham,” responds Varric. He leads her back out into the souks, where they almost collide into a group of beautiful Moroccan women holding large paper bags. Anticipating Merrill's next question, he adds, “it's like a dollar, Daisy,” and tries to figure out where the exit is.

They go the wrong way.

And then they go the wrong way again, and again, and Varric wonders whether this booth of assorted leather handbags is the same as the booth of assorted leather handbags they'd passed five minutes ago, and all the while Merrill's sporadically singing “ _a dollar, a dollar of Daisy_ ” like that one sour cream commercial and he, too, suddenly feels hungry and _terrified_ and more lost than he's ever been which says a lot because he's 5'1 and spent the first eighteen years of his life on a cornfield.

To make matters worse, they’re being followed by a group of barefoot children.

They rush around another corner, into a room of kaftans, before a young boy just grabs Merrill by the tulle on her dress and leads them out because it's very clear to every breathing soul in that country that their only cultural experiences have occurred in New York City's Chinatown.

“And _Boston_ ,” Varric defends to nobody while Merrill delightedly shovels Euros into the boy's hands.

When they finally catch their breath, Varric decides that Exploration Time is over. He takes Merrill by the hand and chaperones her back through the main square, to the left and down an alley that looks like it _might_ eventually lead to the riad.

It doesn’t.

Instead it leads bunch of people (and stray cats) who approach them speaking an assortment of languages that Varric has difficulty identifying. Three scooters zoom by and splash warm water onto his suitcase, and his good ear adopts an awful ringing sound in the wake of their roaring motors.

“Varric, I do not know where we are,” Merrill announces, cheeks flushed pink with heat. 

“What?”

“Varric, I do not-- oh, nevermind.”

Their hunger ultimately forces them into the classy cafe by the entrance of Jemaa El-Fnaa. They collapse around a circular table on the outside patio and are immediately served Fanta by a very cynical, very well-dressed waiter named Gascard who poses for several pictures as he pours mint tea into their glasses.

“We didn’t order tea, though,” Merrill starts to say, but Varric, who actually listens to Fenris on the rare occasion Fenris speaks, cuts her off with a quick pat to her shoulder. He orders them a plate of couscous, olives, and bread that they inhale in the blink of an eye, and Varric leaves entirely too many coins on the table because he’s still not sure which one’s which.

\--

Isabela and Fenris are the pillars of diversity back in Kirkwall, Connecticut, and neither of them observe anything holier than the fruit flies that accumulate at the bottom of their molding wine glasses so it’s really not Varric’s or Merrill's fault when two hours pass and they still haven’t found their riad.

Well. Actually, they’d found hundreds of riads--probably every riad in Morocco--but not a single one of them were called “Riata Nevarra” like Isabela had said.

“How the fuck is Marrakesh one giant fucking riad, anyway?” Varric groans to himself as he once again yanks his damn carry-on wheel from a drain.

“Oh, we are going to the riad?” Merrill asks. A spark of light reappears in her weary eyes, and she straightens like a tulip on the first day of Spring.

“What?”

“I said: oh, we are going to the riad?”

“Y--what? Really? What do you think we’ve been looking for this whole time?”

“I thought we were finding me new shoes,” she explains, pointing at the broken strap on her ballerina flats. “But I really wouldn’t mind finding our riad. In fact a shower sounds very nice, and I can probably borrow shoes from somebody else.”

They walk for another five minutes before Merrill says, in the middle of a selfie, “Varric, we should go to the riad.”

“Yeah, Daise, that's the plan! We'll just go door-to-door to _every fucking riad in McRiadsville_ until we find the one that has rooms attached to our names.”

“But surely somebody must know where it is,” she says, shrugging, “by the address and all.”

“The addr—Merrill.” Varric plants both hands to the sides of her shoulders. “Are you telling me that you _have_ the address?”

“Yes,” Merrill responds, nodding once with purpose.

“To the riad.”

Nodding again, Merrill declares, “yes.”

“The riad that we're staying in.”

“Yes. Isabela needed help deciding between two of them so she sent them on Facebook to me. I don't know why she did that, she was only one room over, she could have gotten up and—”

“Merr—Jesus Christ—Merrill, what's the address?”

“Oh, I have to go on Facebook for that.”

“Would you?”

“Well, yes, but I would need the internet.”

\--

Gascard drops Merrill’s iPhone onto the table.

“It is not work.”

“What do you mean, _it is not work_?” Varric groans. “It’s been taking pictures just fine!”

“Yes, _pictures_ ,” Gascard tells him like he’s stupid. “But WiFi? _Non._ ”

Merrill swallows three more bites of khubz before she says, “but the sign says there’s WiFi here, the sign on your door.”

“WiFi _is_ here. Your phone? No WiFi.”

“Oh. Do you have a phone?”

“Me? Yes.”

“Can I use it to go on Facebook and find the address to our riad?”

Gascard removes his phone from his back pocket, unlocks the screen, and spends two minutes drafting a text before he opens Facebook and hands it to Merrill. He doesn’t look remotely amused when she informs him that everything is in Arabic.

“Yes, of course is Arabic. This is Morocco.”

“Can you change it to English?”

“Non.”

“Can you log into my personal account using Arabic and then translate the address my friend Isabela gave us, and maybe show us where it is?”

Gascard doesn’t bother saying “non” again before he takes his phone back, floats over to a table of Lithuanians, and ignores them for the remainder of their stay.

\--

“Is that Hawke? _HAWKE!_ ”

They almost overturn the table in their haste, bolting across the patio with lopsided suitcases and trails of assorted coins in their wake.

“Hawke!” Merrill cries after him, but Hawke gallops past, oblivious, his grey shirt tied in a turban to the top of his head and his bare chest glistening through the early stages of a sunburn. Sporting a pair of cheap aviators with blue-mirror lenses, he rubs the side of his head against his shoulder to adjust the earbud he's sharing with Fenris, who clings like a giant spider to his back.

“HEY, HAWKE!” hollers Varric. He _swears_ he sees Fenris quirk his head in response, but instead of jumping off his piggy-back ride or, god forbid, turning to look, Fenris simply shrugs and tightens his limbs around Hawke's shirtless torso.

 _Oh, god fucking damn it._ Fenris' bouncing, tattooed asscrack is the last thing Varric sees before he skids on a wayward mango peel and lands on suitcase in the middle of a grate.

–-

Back at the cafe.

Round three.

Well, at least Merrill's kind of smiling, and the tea's dirt cheap so Varric orders another pot and rests his chin in his hands. “What now?” He asks, and Merill gives him that sort of look that makes everyone feel like she might've been abandoned as a child.

She knots her fingers together and mouths something to herself, shakes her head, hiccups into her glass. Eventually she fishes out her iPhone and asks, with all the sincerity in the world: “would you like to take a selfie?”

With the stage of acceptance finally ascending his horizon, Varric deflates against the back of his seat. “Yeah,” he sighs, defeated, folding his arms across his chest and side-leaning toward her. “Yeah, Daisy. Let's take a selfie.”

Merrill holds her iPhone up against the sun and gives her reflection a hopeful grin. Her smile fades a little, so she tries again, this time showing teeth

“Cheese,” Merrill says sadly.

“Cheese,” Varric repeats, dead inside. He clenches his teeth and lifts his chin as high as it'll go. “We are so. Fucked.”

_Click._


End file.
